tradeo socialised trading platform, is copy trading worth doing

[Ethan Carter]

tradeo and similar platforms (etoro is the biggest) push social/copy trading hard. the pitch: follow a verified successful trader, automatically copy their trades proportional to your account.

on paper it sounds great for beginners. in practice ive seen copy traders both profit and blow up depending on who they followed.

for those who tried copy trading seriously: how do you actually evaluate who to copy, and did it work for you long term?

[darkhorizon]

tried copy trading on etoro for 8 months. lost 12% net. the issue: most highly-ranked 'popular investors' make their returns through high leverage and lucky timing, not consistent edge. when their style fails (and it always eventually does) the followers eat the drawdown. statistical analysis of long-term copy trader returns confirms most underperform passive holding.

[jack_online]

+1. copy trading sounds easy but its actually harder than picking a strategy because you're picking a person whose behavior you cant fully observe. you see their trades but not their reasoning, their risk parameters, or their emotional state. you're flying blind in a way that pure strategy trading isnt.

[Gavin]

isnt the whole point that you copy people who are already profitable? how can that lose money?

[asherwood]

'already profitable' is the trap. someone profitable for 6 months might be lucky, not skilled. survivorship bias means we only see the winners on leaderboards, not the dozens who blew up. by the time someone's been profitable for 3 years they often start taking more risk because of pressure from new followers, then blow up. its a structural problem not a copier problem.

[zacharyy]

copy trading is taking advice from someone who couldn't get a job and gets paid by your subscription instead. think about that.

[ghostknight]

thats unfair. some professional traders do offer copy services as supplemental income. quality is mixed but its not all bad. issue is filtering signal from noise, not that the entire category is bad.

[neonpilot]

i copy traded for 6 months and learned a lot from watching the trades made small profit but realized i was outsourcing my growth as a trader. stopped to learn properly. dont regret the experience but its not a long term plan

[Adam]

learn yourself. dont copy.